Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday February 07, 2011 @09:18PM
from the any-way-the-wind-blows dept.

coondoggie writes "The US government today took a bold step toward perhaps finally getting some offshore wind energy development going with $50 million in investment money and the promise of renewed effort to develop the energy source. The plan focuses on overcoming three key challenges (PDF) that have made offshore wind energy practically non-existent in the US: the relatively high cost of offshore wind energy; technical challenges surrounding installation, operations, and grid interconnection; and the lack of site data and experience with project permitting processes."

1. Build out to sea or somewhere else no-one can complain about. The US has both plenty of coast for wind and plenty of uninhabited wilderness for solar.

2. Do it anyway. Back when the UK national grid (electricity distribution network) was built they just got on and did it, despite having to put pylons all over the place. We needed it and would rapidly become a third world nation without it so there was no question. Maybe things are less urgent with renewable energy but no-one wants nuclear in t

Kennedy and Cronkite weren't the the first and second. They were different manifestations of the real challenger, Nimby. Nimby is always there. Nimby doesn't want nuclear, coal, oil, gas, hydro, solar, or wind power. Nimby doesn't go away until things get so bad that all his neighbors tell him to stfu because they're sick of freezing to death.

1) windmills don't explode. Certainly not in a fashion that cause people's shadows to be burned into concrete like the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

Nuclear reactors don't explode, unless they're made of graphite and mismanaged to the point where hydrogen gas builds up and goes poof. They've never caused people's shadows to be burned into concrete, and never will; you can't make 'em go supercritical.

2) and 3): I do agree with you there, but windmills are a really expensive way to generate power, and those generators are difficult enough to keep operating without exposing them to salt water spray.

Why not stick a nuclear reactor out there instead of a windmill? It wouldn't be visible from shore, wouldn't even need a cooling tower since you could use the sea water as a heat sink, and would be far enough out to reduce any chance of radiation leakage hitting the short to a minimum.

I do agree with you there, but windmills are a really expensive way to generate power, and those generators are difficult enough to keep operating without exposing them to salt water spray.

Why not stick a nuclear reactor out there instead of a windmill? It wouldn't be visible from shore, wouldn't even need a cooling tower since you could use the sea water as a heat sink, and would be far enough out to reduce any chance of radiation leakage hitting the short to a minimum.

Because for all the cost of an expensive wind plant, it's dwarfed by the construction and maintenance costs of a nuclear plant. Putting one offshore means more hassles getting the power inshore, more hassles with security and even more hassles with salt water corrosion. One of the really amusing things about trying to wean ourselves off fossil fuels is that we're more than willing to spend billions upon billions of dollars bankrolling nuc plants, we don't give but pennies to wind / water.

That said, it should still be noted that even conventional water-cooled reactors don't explode in a fashion that cause people's shadows to be burned into concrete like the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Spreading that kind of image is irresponsible. Nuclear power has legitimate risks, and those are what should be discussed.

You are total evidence that idiots exist on BOTH sides of the coin.
As others pointed out the bird thing is pretty much a none issue. That is esp. true way off the cost line.
In addition, pebble bed has not taken off because it is not really that economical. There are better designs coming down the road. Personally, I am tired of those 10-20 GW size reactor. Instead, I think that the small 50-100 MW reactors are going to be the big winner over the next 10 years. The reason is that a number of VERY OLD coal

Maybe they don't explode like atomic bombs but tower can and do fail catastrophically, blades and ice from the blades can separate and be thrown 500 m, but the biggest problem with windmills is they just aren't any good for making electricity. On a good day your lucky to get 30% of the data-plate output, and when you really need the electricity either the windmill is becalmed or there is so much wind it's feathered and out of service. On a lot of the windmills when they are becalmed, they draw electricity t

I don't understand why the pitch can't be computer controlled to maintain a constant, acceptable RPM instead of completely feathering the prop in very high winds. After all if you have the ability to take it from an excess of RPM to zero RPM, logic dictates that some angle exists in between those extremes where you get the RPM you need.

No, 30% of capacity is the AVERAGE output of a wind farm, including days that they don't turn. On a "good day" you're getting close to 100% of capacity..

Coal also has similar problems with output efficientcy, you need to build 7 coal plants to get the capacity of 6 since they are down for maintinance for 6-8 weeks per year. You need to build them with a higher capacity than the average draw because of the daily peaks in demand, you need to

Environmentalists don't support clean energy. They pretend to, but what they really want is no energy, back to the dark ages. Give them a solar powered car, and they'll tell you to redesign your life around bicycles. Give them a solar power system, and they'll tell you to turn out the lights.

Environmentalism != Enviro-nuttery

It's stickening that people honestly think this. I think Greenpeace started this crap.

$50 million from the government because there is no profit potential in private industry. Like every other green energy initiative. Remember Carter? This one too will fail. Wind is less than 1% as efficient as coal. You can't change physics. The government will take the hard earned money of young families anyway, mal-invest it, and divert it to cronies like Jeff Immelt at GE. A sick con where there is no accountability. How ironic when there is an amazing revolution going on in natural gas extraction from s

Most of the pricepoint for wind is tied up in all the "Impact studies" that have been tied to it by various NIMBY groups.

"how will it impact tourism?""how will it impact the migratory habits of the eastern canada goose?""how will it impact cellular telephone reception?"........."How will it impact the local congressman's chances for re-election?"

With pretty much all of them being valued at OVER the 50 million startup capital investment made by this move.Quite amusing how all these impact studies get tacked on to projects intended to make everyone's life better, but not on building or development projects of similar scope or magnitude in civic centers. When was the last time you saw a cellular telephone tower getting tied down with impact studies on sparrows? Didn't think so.

Coal and natural gas may last a few hundred years. Wind will be available forever. We will have to switch away from fossil fuels at some point, no matter what objection to alternative energy you can produce. You can't change physics.

What does the efficiency matter when the resource is free? What is more important is the capital cost andthe operating costs. I would be curious to see a citation for your claim of 1% efficiency of wind turbines.

Because at some point you have to pay your initial investment plus interest, your maintenance, and your depreciation (because one day your windmill will be a bucket of rust and you will have to buy another). If you can't do all of those, it's better to put your money elsewhere.

at some point you have to pay your initial investment plus interest, your maintenance, and your depreciation (because one day your windmill will be a bucket of rust and you will have to buy another). If you can't do all of those, it's better to put your money elsewhere.

You've hit the nail on the head! Exactly the problem with nuclear power!

Oh, wait, you were talking about wind (where every one of the costs you describe are orders of magnitude lower than for a nuke plant)...

Oh, wait, you were talking about wind (where every one of the costs you describe are orders of magnitude lower than for a nuke plant)...

I'm not so sure. I mean none of us are sitting with the actual numbers in front of us, but anchoring a wind turbine to the sea floor can't be cheap at all. If bridges across rivers cost hundreds of millions of dollars, it gives us an idea that the cost is not negligible. Now you said that your wanted how many windmills in your wind farm, again?

Depends where 'elsewhere' is. You have to evaluate wind against other forms of energy production, not just on its own merits as a business venture. In the medium to long term it stacks up pretty well, especially if you factor in the amount of government support there is for other types of power station to make them economical.

How can you define efficiency for both wind and coal? Typically the efficiency of a coal power plant is measured as the amount of recovered energy over the amount of released energy (from combustion). How do you define what energy is available for wind power?

Even more importantly, we don't much care how much power is harvested from the wind; what we care about is total output over installation costs, or over maintenance costs. While the wind may not, strictly speaking, be an unlimited resource, it can be

$50 million from the government because there is no profit potential in private industry.
Wind is less than 1% as efficient as coal.

Add to this the NIMBY-s and here's how a great opportunity is lost.
Here's a name to further google for: Samso [ngpowereu.com].

But despite the utilitarian nature of Samso's achievements, the real winners of the project are the big financial investors. One of them is Jörgen Tranberg, who owns a 250-acre dairy farm. With help from the bank, the 55-year-old farmer invested 2.5 million euros in wind turbines. He paid 1.2 million euros for the one on his farm he owns outright and he is half-owner of one of the offshore turbines, too. He claims that on a good day the windmills alone can earn him 3,000 euros, as told by the Independent.

My point: if the farmers(owners) would get the ownership of the turbines and start earning money (that means nobody would actually fuck their input stream), they'd sacrifice their NIMBY-sm in a blink.

Oh dear. It'll cost the oil and coal lobby at least that much in "campaign contributions" to make this problem go away.

The average energy company out there is involved in multiple energy sources, both traditional and alternative. Finding a company that sticks to just oil or coal is pretty rare.

I'm assuming by your comment that you have hatred towards the energy companies because they continue to use earth resources. If so, then you should look at this as a $50 million bonus to those exact same companies. It was their lobbying and campaign contributions that convinced the government to give away our money.

That headline just seems seriously broken to me... you can fire up a generator, or a boiler... because, you know, there's fire involved... but "firing up offshore wind energy" just seems rather incongruous.

Sounds like someone is mixing their batter into their metaphors, or something like that.

The article claims 3 challenges. I claim the article is worthless without addressing the 4th!

the relatively high cost of offshore wind energy; technical challenges surrounding installation, operations, and grid interconnection; and the lack of site data and experience with project permitting processes."

They missed NIMBYism!!! Amateurs.

UNLESS, they included it in "...project permitting processes."

Maybe now that the Kennedy's have more or less completely kicked off at this point, Obama can finally tap the North Eastern ocean?

Bring it to the rustbelt, we have some of the best spots for wind generation in the country, some of the dirtiest power production, and not so many up tight people worried about their view being ruined. Oh, and can float the parts out of the factory if you set it up in one of the hundreds of abandoned factories on the waterfronts thus reducing shipping costs to near free.

Harnessing wind and other green technologies is great, but I wouldn't bet my life on any of them except hydro. The problem with things like the wind is that when the wind stops blowing (or blows too strong), the wind turbines don't put out electricity. I remember driving by miles of idle windmills in California. Don't know why they weren't turning, but it indicates to me that there is an inherent problem with depending on the technology.

"I believe that mountain lions go downwind to stalk their prey. Is there any chance that the increased wind caused by the windmills has led to an influx of mountain lions because their prey is easier to stalk? Somebody should look into this." -Anon Reader, Dec. 19, 2010

"To the person who knows about the windmills in Western New York. Is there an entity to call to see is we can get them turned off for a couple weeks. We need some snow in the area before the people who plow snow go out of business. I think they keep pushing the storms back to the coast." -Anon Reader, Dec. 26, 2010

"It was a very calm day today so I drove out to see the windmills to set the record straight. Just as I thought, there was no wind today because they were not moving at all. The next windy day, I am driving out again and I bet they will be turning like crazy." -Anon Reader, Jan. 9, 2011

People are going to bring up the inevitable comparison with Nuclear. So before they do Nuclear already has a healthy share of the DOE's development budget and it's only a good idea if you think a single energy solution will work. It won't. Wind is more scalable than Nuclear because 1 Gw of wind power can be brought on incrementally, 1Gw of nuclear power has to wait a minimum of ten years before the plant is complete. For the same reason a 1Gw reactor that is shut down produces 0Gw, A 1Gw wind farm with a wind generator shutdown produces almost full capacity minus the non-functioning generators.

Nuclear occupies the mining space as well as the reactor space in land so they are probably about even there.

The technology employed in a Nuclear reactor will be almost a decade out of date on day one of production presuming the very latest technology was implemented in the design. With a wind farm new technology can be implemented as old wind generators come off-line. This means the gap between technology updates for wind power are available much closer in time when compared to production, this means the rate of technology development in wind power is faster than nuclear.

Wind power has a much lower energy cost to tear down because it can be demolished like a normal building, Nuclear power plant have very special and costly concerns when you have to tear them down and time will eventually take its toll on the reactor building.

Before some one talks about "Only Nuclear can do base load", base load is a function of the entire grid not any one energy source.

American are extremely blessed with wind power and indeed other sources. The potential exists to solve most, if not all of America's energy requirements. Every technology professional stands to benefit from the flow on effects of all alternate energy solution AND still use nuclear as a longer term solution as the technology is developed in that area. It's difficult to believe that there is only enough imagination for a Nuclear solution when, clearly, Solar and wind are very appealing technologically.

This meme (along with the one about fossil fuels getting the bulk of energy research dollars) really needs to die. It makes people who are pro-renewables look like extremists who'll bend the statistics any which way to try to make it support their position. Here's the breakdown on DOE funding dollars [nationalaglawcenter.org] (pdf warning). Divide it by the amount of electricity generated by source [wikipedia.org] to get our return on investment:

$50 million is not that much. In Germany the investment in offshore wind energy in 2008 was € 25 000 million (approx $ 36 000 million). And Germany is only a small country and is not at the forefront of wind energy deployment. However, in Germany the owner of wind turbines get 9 cent per kWh at the beginning and 5 cent per kWh later as a guaranteed price for their electricity and if possible other plants have to reduce their output so that the electricity from renewable sources is consumed first. Howev

Not trying to be flamebait, but wind power is generally considered to be "free" power, but the energy is coming from somewhere. While we're not at a scale yet which could have an impact, has anyone studied the effect of taking that kinetic energy out of the weather system? Scaled up in a big way could we affect weather patterns?

Screw drilling. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but big oil is not so concerned about proceedure as they are about profit, which is exactly why Shell had deep water horizon explode like that. Moreover, it was not a singular incident. The federal investigation found systemic wrongdoing [independent.co.uk] in many offshore drilling projects.

What I want to see, is land-based wind generation in areas suited to it. My home state could power at least 3 others if this were to come to fruition.

It is absolutely disgusting that people can build a new skyscraper in New York without any 'Environmental impact studies" on migratory birds, but somehow it becomes so very relevent as soon as we are talking about non-poluting power generation structures.

Uhm... Most (all?) commercial wind turbines are designed to furl (fold back) the blades if the wind speed exceeds the safe power generation threshold, and are geared to turn at much slower speeds than 300mph. (Try closer to 20 to 40mph, with a max at around 60. After that they go into stall mode.)

At 300mph you wouldnt be able to see the blades, and the kinetic energy in them would tear them off the rotor. (Each blade weighs several tons in commercial wind generator equipment. The stress of rotation at that

Are you confusing wind speed with blade speed? Blades move much faster than the wind.My local ones: 35m blades @ 22rpm max, so 290km/hr at the blade tips. OK km, not miles.Worlds biggest is 126m diameter at 12rpm, so about the same speed.

The drug user does not blame the dealer for their addiction, but does blame the dealer for cutting the cocaine with powdered lye when it causes them severe caustic soda burns in their nasal passages-- simply because they got a deal on powdered lye and ordered more than their meth cooks could turn into meth, making it cheaper than baking soda. Afterall, caustic soda.. baking soda.. what's the difference?

CFLs are an improvement over incandecent for a number of reasons, but believing that switching to them would in some fashion mean that we wont need new power plants is retarded in and of itself.

People keep having sex. People keep moving to our country. People keep buying and making expensive electronic devices. All these things totally trump any reduction in useage that changing lightbulb technology could ever hope to bring to the table. We need sustainable power generation, and we needed it yesterday.

People keep saying "nuclear reactors" as if it was some kind of magical chant that overcomes all technical and political considerations. Currently mankind generates ~13TW globally by burning 14,000,000 tons of coal per day. To replace that with nukes by 2050 would require building two reactors a day for the next 40 years, to replace it with wind we need to build 900-1000 windmills per day for the next 40 years, to replace it with solar we need ~400 sq kilometrs of solars cells (in total, not per day). The t

Tech marches on. I notice that my 47" LCD HDTV uses much less energy than my 32" CRT television did. It weighs a hell of a lot less too. You'd think with all these new devices that use less power than the old stuff that eventually things would at least stop getting worse.

Yet that is what the government tells us is the reason for forcing us to change to CFLs.

No, that's what your strawman says. Or surely you can provide a link to the government report saying so.

But not nuclear power.

Not currently sustainable. Yes, there are promising designs. They're just now rolling out. But it's not there yet...just like every other sustainable power generation method. And older designs, such as breeder reactors, would take about 10 years to build anyway.

Not currently sustainable. Yes, there are promising designs. They're just now rolling out. But it's not there yet...just like every other sustainable power generation method. And older designs, such as breeder reactors, would take about 10 years to build anyway.

Seriously though, while in Hawaii a few...hmmmm.....over a decade ago, I noticed they had all these huge windmills on Oahu. They didn't seem to be working too well so I asked about them. It seems that when they got the bright idea to put them up the didn't think about the trade winds carrying all that salt. It seems salt is very bad for machinery, to the point that the operating costs exceeded the price of the electricity they generated. So at least I hope that they've thought about this problem with of

"It should cover the costs of determining what impact it will have on the local wolf population. That's a common method used by the tree-huggers to slow down road work around here, where we have an active population of 0 wolves."

Well, when the government is handing out almost $1 Billion US in subsides to the "Biofuel" industry to build wood-chip converting plants in, of all places, Texas, maybe it is a good idea to diversify. Oil too expensive? Fall back on nearly-free lumber resources, and burn it in our S

The four plants the "loan" is for are to be located in Texas, Georgia and two in Mississippi. This sounds very sketchy to me...why not build the plants where there are actually trees? Sounds more like a contract scam--the plants are never meant to be profitable. More then likely the builders make their money (paid for with our taxes) from the construction, the plan

First generation wind generators couldn't cover their maintenance costs with their generation revenue.

Those people got something for their money. But at the end of the subsidy the generator was worth less then zero as it cost money to take it down. Still might have been a good deal if you got in early.

Those wood plants could run on brush. Is the one in Texas near Crawford?

Joking aside. We generate buttloads of wood 'scrap'. I know a guy who sells round tables (for 10K$US) sliced off the end of one of

The onus is on you. You need proof for your dubious claims before I can even begin to fathom how sounds can do that to living things (especially since they are already everywhere around us anyway, solely because there are living beings).

Offshore wind has a number of advantages over rural farmland. The wind is stronger and more consistent, which permits higher utilization and more regular power. The towers can also be taller, where the stronger and more consistent winds are. The turbines can be larger, which tend to have better conversion efficiency and, again, more consistency. Offshore puts the power production much closer to where it is consumed: a couple of miles offshore from the eastern seaboard is better than nearly over 1000 mil